Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Alvin Weinberg

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ALVIN WEINBERG
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
1984
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
DR. WEINBERG: …Clarence and Jane to have an opportunity to talk to you. I guess I will tell you things about myself that you probably don’t know, although among the close friends that I have, I guess, our lives have intersected as closely as any.
MR. LARSON: That’s right and for an extended period…
DR. WEINBERG: People don’t realize perhaps that you were my boss for oh, what was it? Almost 15 years, I guess at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That actually, you were a very close friend of my sister and brother-in-law, long before I knew that you existed.
MR. LARSON: That’s right. I look back very fondly on those days.
DR. WEINBERG: Let me start with my early recollections of myself. I was born in Chicago. My parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who came to this country around 1908. The atmosphere in our house was, as was the case with most Russian Jewish immigrants who came at that time, were really quite intellectual. They encouraged us for example; my sister and I, and I do have an older sister, about 5 years older than I, the atmosphere was one which placed a premium on intellectual excellence. We were required to take piano lessons for example although I hated to play the piano at the time; I have kept with it all my 69 years. Now I enjoy it very much and am grateful to my mother for having beaten on me to keep playing the piano. And of course my sister had a very strong influence on me. She was again, the sort of person who was very bright and she of course had to be the head of her class always and I was the kid brother and I always had to emulate my sister. People would say, when you grow up you might do as well as your sister, Fay did. And I think that my sister had a very strong influence on me in my very early days. My father was in the clothing manufacturing business. He was the manager of a factory that manufactured women’s dresses. He was in that business…
MR. LARSON: And he was in Chicago?
DR. WEINBERG: This was in Chicago, yes. I went to school, grammar school in Chicago and also high school and I guess I first had the idea that I might have a scientific career, I suppose very early in life, although I didn’t really know exactly, I really quite, can’t reconstruct exactly how I came to it. It may have been when I was 8 or 9 years old I became a Lone Scout. The Lone Scouts were scouts, who didn’t belong to a real troop, but they were given a handbook and you were allowed to do things by yourself, on your own. Somehow I got involved with some of the, my friends at the time, we would do little experiments according to the book.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course in scouting they have well defined projects and experiments.
DR. WEINBERG: It wasn’t all that well defined quite at that time as I recall, but I think that that perhaps moved me somewhat in that direction. I suppose another thing was that very early because my sister was older than I, our family bought the “Book of Knowledge”. The “Book of Knowledge” was a book of standards, an encyclopedia in those days. You probably know what I’m talking about.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I love that “Book of Knowledge”. I just would read it, and read it, and read it. I guess I learned an awful lot reading the “Book of Knowledge”. Then I remember my parents bought me a chemistry set for Christmas on time. I loved to do experiments. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but it did sort of orient me toward science. Then I suppose a little bit later, I may have been in the ninth grade or seventh grade at the time, I somehow got hold of a book, “Schlossmann’s Creative Chemistry”.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes, that’s a very famous book.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s right. This was a book in which he talked about advances in chemical technology as we would call it. The chemical industry and I was much intrigued by it. Somehow I thought at that time, I thought that I would become a chemical engineer, although I wasn’t very sure what a chemical engineer was.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, in interviewing many people, particularly people like Teller, and several others who have become physicists later, they started out in chemistry because they didn’t see how they could make a living in physics.
DR. WEINBERG: I moved into physics for a less lofty reason which I will come to shortly, Clarence. Well, then I went to high school and I was a very good student in high school. I also again following in the footsteps of my sister became the editor of our newspaper. I was the editor of our newspaper for a whole year. I guess if I ask myself what talents really do bring in there, I suppose to some degree it’s a talent for articulating things and I think that probably goes back to when I was the editor of our newspaper. As a matter of fact I had been, again, following in the footsteps of my sister, of course she had been the editor of the newspaper, I had been the editor of our junior high school newspaper and it was at that time, I was in the seventh grade I believe and the editor at the junior high school, that I had my first experience in causing the powers that be a great deal of trouble because of something that I had written. It was something like this that we had an assembly and in those days the students would get together and the principal would get up and we’d have an assembly. The principal gave a stirring lecture on why the girls at the school should not use so much lipstick and rouge. So I wrote an editorial which I called “Watch the War Paint”. When the dean of students saw that editorial in our junior high school newspaper, she was fit to be tied. The reason being was our newspaper circulated throughout the Chicago school system and it ill behooved or ill became the dean of students at our junior high school to have it be known that at the Hipper Junior High School, which was the school I attended, were fallen women using all that war paint. So, all hell broke loose. I guess by that time I was about ready to graduate, so they didn’t have to demote me from being the editor of our newspaper, but that sort of in a way been the story of my life I guess. I always say a little more than I should, and people get very angry at me.
MR. LARSON: That’s remarkable. I’m reminded that one of the other people that I interviewed with, Dr. White, who is now the head of the National Academy of Engineering…
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yes, Bob White.
MR. LARSON: …and he spent a whole year after he graduated from college as a newspaper reporter. He said that was one of the most valuable experiences of his life because he learned how to articulate and write things so that people could understand. So this is interesting with regard to your experience in high school with the newspaper.
DR. WEINBERG: In high school, I was a very good student. I think I graduated third in a class of about 700 students and I took, no, I didn’t take biology, but I took all of the other sciences that were available then and all the mathematics. I must confess that I didn’t understand physics when I studied physics in high school. I’ve often wondered why that was and I guess I decided that it wasn’t entirely my fault, although I guess it really indicated that I wasn’t and I have never regarded myself as a, really talented in science. What I know in science and the few things I’ve accomplished in science I’ve always felt have always come hard to me. I’ve always had to work harder than other people, but I do feel, to some degree that I must mitigate my lack of success in science by the fact that at that time, we didn’t really have a person who understood physics teaching physics. I look back now and the fellow, who was teaching physics, at the same time, he was teaching high school physics, was taking the elementary college course in physics at night. He was about one paragraph ahead of the class. So I never could quite understand what the thing was quite about. I passed the physics class all right, with a good grade, but it wasn’t nearly as good, I would get a 98s and so on in chemistry. I did great in chemistry. The fellow that taught chemistry was a good chemist, well he understood chemistry, not so in physics. I guess I in later years often contrasted that experience which I had in the…
[Phone rings]
DR. WEINBERG: Excuse me.
[Break in video]
DR. WEINBERG: …as very poor science instruction that was available in the Chicago high school, well this was Roosevelt High School at the time with a remarkable science and mathematics instruction than some of my mentors like Eugene Wigner had in Hungary and Budapest. Eugene Wigner has often said to me that he attended in Budapest the high school, which at the time was probably the best high school in the world. The science and mathematics teachers there were doing research in science and mathematics and he often contributes his, of course he’s profoundly and tremendously talented, innately, but also often attributes his success in science to the marvelous, marvelous underpinning that he received as a youngster in this Lutheran high school in Budapest.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, I believe there were several other famous men that attended high school...
DR. WEINBERG: At that high school there was [Leo] Szilard, [John] Von Neumann, and Wigner, and they went to school together at that Lutheran high school in Budapest and they taught each other, but they also had these marvelous teachers. One mathematics teacher in particular who was able enough to recognize Von Neumann as a great genius and helped him along. I guess Teller came along a little bit later.
MR. LARSON: That’s right. That’s a remarkable story. Such a concentration of genius in one small area in one brief period of time.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. Well as I think about it, I guess I would say that I learned a good deal in high school, didn’t learn very much science actually, learned some chemistry, a little bit of physics, a fair amount of mathematics. I do remember trigonometry, but at that time, we never heard of a derivative or calculus.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well that was standard, higher algebra and trigonometry, was as far as you would go in high school.
DR. WEINBERG: Right, right. I actually skipped several grades through high school. so when I graduated high school I had just turned 16. Sometimes I think that that was a big disadvantage as far as I was concerned, because then when I went on to the University of Chicago, I was really too young so that I never felt comfortable socially at the University of Chicago. All the time I was there.
MR. LARSON: Being 16 that meant that you were perhaps, at least, one to two years younger than the others.
DR. WEINBERG: Yeah, I imagine that so many of the people you have interviewed had that experience that they went through the elementary school and the high school quicker than most so they came and had this disadvantage when they went to college. They were you know, a little bit out of it socially.
MR. LARSON: That’s right.
DR. WEINBERG: Well…
MR. LARSON: Apparently it wasn’t too much of a disadvantage, except socially as you say at that time.
DR. WEINBERG: I never felt terribly happy at college I guess, probably for that reason. Well then the Depression hit just as I graduated from high school which was 1931, and I entered the University of Chicago. I did not get a scholarship my first year at the University of Chicago. They had entrance examinations. I took the entrance examination in physics and I did not understand physics very well, so I didn’t do well enough on the physics examination to get a scholarship. I did get scholarships after one year at the University of Chicago, else I wouldn’t be able to stay at the university because my father by that time was out of a job and well it was pretty rough. We’d find places where you could get a nice meal for 10 cents.
MR. LARSON: Well, that was universal; you managed to get along…
DR. WEINBERG: Yes.
MR. LARSON: …under these very stringent circumstances.
DR. WEINBERG: Then I came to the University of Chicago when the so-called New Plan of Robert Hutchins was instituted. I must say that was the most powerful, the best educational experience that anybody could have possibly have had.
MR. LARSON: How do you characterize that in a few words?
DR. WEINBERG: The general idea was that you were exposed to all branches of knowledge. So you took a one year course in the biological sciences, I enjoyed it tremendously. I’d never had any biological sciences. You took a one year course in the social sciences, a one year course in humanities, and a one year course in the physical sciences, because I had opted for a chemistry major, it wasn’t necessary for me to take the physical science course because I took other courses, but the other three in biological, social, and the humanities, I did take the courses and they were just extraordinary, very tough courses. I had to work very hard at them. I had to read everything, but I think that they gave me a better preparation than almost anybody could have, well as good a preparation as anybody else at the University of Chicago. Our class was really quite an extraordinary class. My class mates, some came later, some came about that same time, there was Paul Samuelson, who got the Nobel Prize in economics, then there was Herb Simon…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: …he was one of my classmates. It was a very active and edifying intellectual environment that we had there. Well…
MR. LARSON: Presumably the professors were good enough to do this properly.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yes. The difference in the university and the high school is enormous. I mean everybody, all of the university professors knew what they were talking about. No question that they knew more than you did. But also the students were so good and that was a very edifying although sometimes sobering experience. You come to college and you’re at the top of your class and then you find others who were at the top of their class. Then it’s not so easy to be at the top of the class. Well I was planning at that time to major in chemistry although I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, possibly be a chemistry teacher, possibly at high school and college. Turned out that and I never quite understood that totally, although I did very well in the elementary chemistry, when I came to organic chemistry I was told that I wasn’t very handy in the laboratory.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: Now I have often thought about that and often wondered myself if I, should I have accepted that or should I not have accepted that. Had I not accepted that I think I probably could have become handy in laboratory, but the professor, his name was Gladfeld, I remember, he said, “Well, I think you ought to do something other than chemistry.” So I thought a while and decided that maybe in physics I would do better. Although I got very good grades, I got A’s in all the courses, but somehow, I didn’t make much of an impression as a laboratory chemist.
MR. LARSON: In laboratory organic chemistry, you have to have superb teachers who have intuitive feel for techniques to impart, otherwise it’s very difficult.
DR. WEINBERG: I guess so, although the other people would get 80 percent yields in their preparations, I would get 10 percent yields or something like that. Was it because I was too impatient? I don’t know. I know my father always, he always had wanted to be an engineer, but he never did make it being an engineer, but he always took delight in doing things with his hands and making things work and so on. So as I say, had I pursued it, I think I could have managed it, but I’ll never know. So I switched to physics and I found physics hard, not easy, but I did very well in it. Large part I suppose was because I worked hard at it and at the same time, I took lots of mathematics. I really had a double major in mathematics and in physics. I graduated, I guess I was at the top of the graduating class, or well at that time, they had these comprehensive examinations and you had to take, what was it? Six comprehensive examinations in the general courses and then two comprehensive examinations, or one very major comprehensive examination in your major, which was physics. I got A as a top grade in all of the examinations, except physics. Physics I got a C. I was very depressed. I thought, gee, there is something wrong. Then there was one of my fellow students, he got I don’t know, a D or something. So he complained to the management and so they decided that they would look at the examinations again and it turned out that they had made an error in grading the examinations. So the upshot was that I got an A in it. So I got straight A’s in everything. By this time I did have, I was given a scholarship because I was very poor and also, I became an NYA student. You remember the National Youth Administration had these jobs. The job…
MR. LARSON: That was certainly a great help to the students.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yeah, the job I had was to analyze the literature, German literature in a classics library, what that meant was that I would go through these old volumes of textual criticism of ancient Greek texts. It was all written in German, German journals. And I would make an abstract of each one of these and that would go in the card file. It was called analyzing the journals. So I, in a curious sort of way, I learned about Greek and Roman literature this way. I hated the job and yet I guess I learned something at the job, but I suppose it characterized much of what I did. I would always sort of get involved in things other than what I was suppose to be doing. Well, so I graduated, I guess I graduated with honors I think that’s what they called it. I decided by then that I would go into physics and by that time I also became friendly with professor Carl Eckart, who later became one of the foremost oceanographers, theoretical oceanographers and head of the Scripps Institute [of Oceanography] and he of course had a great influence on my, on my future career. I worked with him on a problem in theoretical physics on, well, it was a quantum mechanical, the Hamiltonian of the carbon dioxide molecule, which again it’s sort of funny that it proves again that anything you do in the past, later on it will be helpful to you, no matter what it is. It’s sort of funny that this was in 1935, 1936 and here it is almost 50 years later and I’ve been pretty much involved in the whole question of the greenhouse effect, which is caused by carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is caused by the absorption of the carbon dioxide molecule in these three different bands, which of course correspond to the three different fundamental vibrations of carbon dioxide and then I go back 50 years and remember that that is what I had worked on 50 years ago. So it all sort of fits together in a strange and curious sort of way.
MR. LARSON: Let’s see. You were really exposed to quantum mechanics at that time. It was just really getting into the universities about then.
DR. WEINBERG: 1935. Yes. 1935.
MR. LARSON: Of course it had a great development in the ‘20’s but I guess it didn’t quite get into the university teaching until the 1930’s.
DR. WEINBERG: The book we used was one of the first books. There were two books that we used. One by Hal Hepburn and the other by Linus Pauling, well Pauling and Wilson, E. Bright Wilson who worked at the technical library with Pauling. That’s where I really learned quantum mechanics and Carl Eckart was my teacher and he was my professor. My career took a rather curious turn because I got interested, in fact I was enchanted I suppose by a strange Russian who was a Rockefeller’s fellow at Chicago and then became professor. His name was Nicholas Rashevsky, and Rashevsky was the one who was proposing to create a theoretical structure, a mathematical, theoretical structure for biology…
[Phone rings]
DR. WEINBERG: Excuse me.
[Break in video]
DR. WEINBERG: these ideas for creating mathematical theoretical structure in biology and I was simply enchanted by all this. So I along with some of my theoretically inclined friends in the physics department at Chicago decided that we would throw our lot in with him. So I became a mathematical biophysicist. I helped Rashevsky start the field of mathematical biophysics along with other people of course. That meant that along with my physics degree I had to have a degree in biology. So I went back and took courses in experimental physiology and botany and oh, I must have taken four or five courses in various aspects of physiology. Actually did experiments on dogs and I rather enjoyed it. I spent the years I guess from 1936 until about ‘41, ‘42, as a mathematical biophysicist. Some of the things I did then looking back on it now were pretty naïve, but some of the things I’m still not ashamed of.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well of course you’ve been applying mathematics to a very complex biological system. It really strains your resources.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, of course at that time the whole enterprise was not regarded as being terribly, which I say, terribly serious. They thought it was a contradiction in terms to have mathematical biology, but Rashevsky was a man of infinite optimism, infinite imagination. He was very industrious and he kept the pot bubbling. He started his own journal that was sort of a house organ called the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics and our little group would publish in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. I was involved in two aspects of the work. One was the problem with periodicities in biological systems and the other was the problem of nerve conduction, nerve excitation, nerve conduction. As I look back on what myself was able to do, I was rather naïve, I guess of some of the ideas that were in these early papers on nerve conduction have to some degree survived and even are referred to occasionally, although the theory has been superseded by the remarkable work done by Hodgkins Huxley for which they got the Nobel Prize in 1952. But as far as the other work was concerned, my doctorial work was based on analysis of certain periodicities in biological systems, I didn’t realize until very much later that we were nibbling at that considerations that underlay the work of [Viscount Ilya] Prigogine. Prigogine who was the founder really, one of the founders of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and it was he who formulated problems of the same character as the ones we did, but he carried them very much further and I was amazed, though I had not followed Prigogine’s work, I was only dimly aware of it, I was amazed about 10 years ago when I was at a meeting in Romania of all places, the European Physical Society to hear one of Prigogine’s disciples give a talk and he started with a set of equations which were for all the world identical to the equations that I had considered 35 years earlier when I was working with Rashevsky. So in a sense what I had done there then, well I didn’t think all that much of it, actually was in the same direction as this work that Prigogine finally brought to fruition. Of course Prigogine won the Nobel Prize, oh, a half a dozen years ago for his work that he had done. So I was involved then as a biophysicist working on problems that had to do with the diffusion of materials in and out of cells.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So this must have laid the foundation for your work in reactor theory.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s exactly correct because then what happened was, well, 1939 came along and yes, I heard about fission again we were a bit disappointed because again one of my colleagues Gail Young who later came to the Oak Ridge Naitonal Laboratory had been talking about the fissioning along with Rashevsky the fissioning of cells and mathematically the problem was identical to the problem of the fissioning of the uranium nucleus.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: But at that time those two communities were intellectually completely separate. So there is no one who knew about the fissioning of cells and also knew about the separations of the Bohr liquid drop model. Had they done so it’s conceivable that Gail Young may have anticipated the discovery of the fission of uranium, but that’s after the fact it looks easier than before the fact, of course. But the work that I did with Rashevsky was done also in collaboration with Carl Eckart. He followed my work very closely and so when, well shortly before the war broke out, I think this was in late 1941, shortly before the war when the US was involved. At the time I was a research associate working for Rashevsky I was asked by Carl Eckart if I would join him for six months half time to work on this very farfetched possibility of making nuclear energy. I should explain that by 1940, I had decided that mathematical biology could only go so far. To make further progress one would have to do experimental work and so I had made arrangements to work with Kenneth S. Cole, KS Cole, who was in my view the foremost biophysicist in neurophysiology and I received an NRC fellowship to work with Cole, but then the war came along just as I was about to take the fellowship. My life would have been totally different had I taken that fellowship. I would have been a neurophysiologist and had fun with nerves. But instead I came to work with Carl Eckart and he said the diffusion of neutrons and the diffusion of cells are not too different a problem, so why don’t you just help work on the diffusion of neutrons. So I began work part time but by the time of Pearl Harbor, I had begun, well shortly after Pearl Harbor, I worked full time, I think I joined the work full time, although I had been working part time, I think it was January 1942. I had been working three or four months with Carl Eckart before that on problems involved with neutron diffusion. Then Carl Eckart announced that he was going to leave to work on underwater sound at the laboratory in La Jolla, in San Diego. That was a great disappointment to me because I wondered how anybody could be as bright as Carl Eckart, as competent as Carl Eckart. Eckart said, “Don’t worry. Eugene Wigner is going to come.” Of course I had heard about Eugene Wigner as this great formidable physicist, and then I will never forget the first time I met this famous man at that time, the work on the chain reaction was established in Chicago under Compton’s edict and Wigner was in Princeton and he would commute between Chicago and Princeton. During his stay, his short five or six day stays he would have a succession of young people who were working on the problems and he would meet them at all hours of the day or night and I remember the very first time I met him. I was in the mathematics building, it was called Eckart Hall in Chicago and I with great fear and trepidation showed him what I was doing. I was working on a problem of the multiplication of beryllium due to neutrons and I guess I never have gotten over my awe of Eugene Wigner in the ‘50’s, 45 years that have elapsed since that time. I never really met anyone with that extraordinary mathematical and physical power that he displayed. I’d never met anyone like that. I always thought that Carl Eckart was the brightest physicist I ever met and here I saw someone that was even brighter. It was unbelievable to me to have, well I guess it had a tremendous effect on my ego. How could anyone do anything that this guy would consider was at all worthwhile? So that’s how I first met Eugene Wigner. Of course he’s had more influence on me as many other scientists have had enormous influence because I gradually became his assistant in two respects. On the one hand his assistant in charge of the nuclear design of the chain reactors but also I guess he got to like me as a person somehow and would somehow depend on me to help him keep all of the prima donnas who were working with him happy. Well they were young prima donnas, but they were young never the less. I would often intercede to sort of smooth things out. He would depend on me for this. He would ask me for advice for things of that sort.
MR. LARSON: So essentially, you had to plunge right into the analysis and design of the nuclear reactors.
DR. WEINBERG: Even though I didn’t know anything about nuclear physics, so it was really a quick learn on my part. All I knew was something about classical diffusion theory and I was great on Bessel’s functions which turned out to be kind of useful. But he put me in charge then, well after showing me how you make the calculation on, for the multiplication constant. He put me in charge of the multiplication constant. He must realize that in those days before the first chain reaction had been established it was a real question whether the multiplication constant for ordinary uranium and graphite could be made chain reacting at all. I was the one who had to keep track of all the experiments that Fermi was doing, analyze them and then convert them into a recipe and estimate for what the Hanford reactor itself would look like. So that really was my main job at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. I did, well I remember one thing that I did which I suppose persuaded Wigner that I was able to do something as he was not quite sure how much I could do at that time. He gave me the problem of computing the flow of neutrons through empty channels. See if you have control rods in a big reactor, then the rods are empty channels and neutrons would stream through these channels and it was a bit of a calculation how much of that streaming would be. I was able to make that calculation and I think he was visibly relieved that one of his younger people was able to make the calculation. Ordinarily, he would do all the calculations himself and I remember after he saw the result that I got, he looked at it and said, “Oh yes, yes, of course. That must be the result.” I was very relieved that I had gotten somehow the correct result and then I remember shortly thereafter I went to see Fermi and he said, “Oh yes, I computed that independently,” and he showed me how he computed it in about one line, where it took me about four pages to make the computation. Well…
MR. LARSON: Well, in other words you have to be more or less in daily contact with the experimental results of the multiplication experiments…
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. Yes these were the so called exponential experiments and these were done successively, approximating more and more the actual Hanford reactor and at each stage, I was supposed to analyze those results and see what they implied as far as the actual production reaction was concerned. In the course of this work, I was asked to do the nuclear design for a pilot plant that was going to be built in Oak Ridge and that of course was the X-10 reactor and that was something that was sort of done on the side. It was not a big deal by that time, I think [inaudible]. So, the chain reaction was then completed on December 2, 1942, just about three weeks later the design that Wigner and his group had carried through for the original plutonium producing reactor was completed. It was the famous CE-407 was the number [inaudible] engineering design of water cooled 250 megawatt water cooled graphite moderated reactor. That was the basic design for the Hanford reactor, the basic design which was taken over by DuPont and built into the plutonium producing reactors at Hanford.
MR. LARSON: Was there some controversy with regard to the coolant at first that you had to resolve?
DR. WEINBERG: When I first joined the project there was a big controversy because the engineers wanted to cool the reactor with helium and Fermi was inclined toward helium. Wigner said you would never get helium to work in this short time schedule because the temperatures were too high and material problems would be intractable in such short time. He was right. So single handedly he was able to turn the entire project around. I have often wondered why he was able to do it and I’ve often said that the reason he was able to do it was because of, he was the only person or almost the only person in the whole project who combined a great skill as a nuclear physicist with a great skill as an engineer. Wigner was of course a chemical engineer with training and he was the only one who commanded both of those duties. So he was able to see both the engineering and physics aspects and make the compromises in multiplication that were necessary to go for water cooling.
MR. LARSON: In retrospect, if it had gone the helium route it might have delayed…
DR. WEINBERG: It would have taken much longer. It’s doubtful the plutonium project would have been built on time. It was a great decision that Wigner made. And the DuPont people saw it and they came in at first in favor of heavy water reactors and gas cooled and then they came around to the water cooled graphite reactors. Well, so, in the meantime and alongside the work that was aimed simply at the Hanford reactors I conducted research along with Wigner of course on the other possible ways of making chain reactions and we studied all sorts of ways. One of the ways that we studied and I did this in collaboration with Robert Christy who later was one of the inventors of the enclosed bomb.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: …at Los Alamos, but he was at Chicago at the time. And we did calculations on the use of water as a moderator and as a coolant. I guess that is how I first got interested in the possibility of water both as a moderator and as a coolant. Well then after the Hanford reactors were built, well we had this period in which they were being built, we had all sorts of problems that would arise, one for example well I remember meeting in Compton’s office with Fermi and Wigner around Christmas of 1943. By then we had word that the Germans were working on this. So Wigner went up to the blackboard and showed that the Germans might have the bomb by Christmas of 1944. Wrote it down how long it would take to do this that and the other, of course he was implicitly making the assumption that everybody on the German project was as smart as Eugene Wigner and that of course was not correct.
MR. LARSON: Well, they had Heisenberg who was very smart…
DR. WEINBERG: And he wasn’t an engineer. He didn’t have much aptitude or interest in this type of heavy engineering Eugene took great delight in actually. He didn’t think it quite possible for this war, whereas Szilard, Wigner, more than any others on the project really thought it was possible, and of course Ernest Lawrence thought that it was possible. Well, so one of the difficulties that they encountered was when we discovered that plutonium 240 had a huge spontaneous fission yield and there for the plutonium that was made at Hanford might not work.
MR. LARSON: That must have been a devastating finding.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, it was terrible. It occurred rather late. I think it was early in 1944 and people were thinking is it possible to take the plutonium out of the Hanford reactors and convert it to U-233. It was at this time that the idea of small compact water reactors was thought of. It was Wigner that suggested it and these reactors were in configuration not very different from reactors that have since been built with water moderation. Well, I continued to help out in the improvements in the design while we worked on the disposition of the control rods at Hanford and the Hanford project was finally on its way and we were able to start thinking about longer range aspects of nuclear power. We did this at the so called New Piles Committee, which met about ten times in late ’44 and early ’45. At these meetings people would offer ideas for new kinds of reactors. About this time, also I had been contacted by the Navy and they began showing some interest in submarine reactors and I believe this was the first time I suggested to them a way to do the nuclear Navy was a pressurized water reactor. This was still during the war.
MR. LARSON: That was before the war ended.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, before the war ended, yes.
MR. LARSON:’45.
DR. WEINBERG: I think it was Admiral Mills who was involved with it. Well, about this time, shortly before the war ended, plans were being made for what to do after the war and Wigner got the idea of moving the group to Oak Ridge and building a great laboratory, a nuclear energy laboratory in Oak Ridge. In light of this idea, I moved down to Oak Ridge. Now Oak Ridge at this time was doing experiments on light water reactor lattices, largely at my suggestion because I had been interested in light water and we were quite amazed that light water with ordinary uranium almost was chain reactant. Had it been chain reacting, of course, our faces would have been very red because why did we have to go to all the trouble of getting graphite, if you could do it with light water. You couldn’t quite do it with light water.
MR. LARSON: It was .98 or something like that.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Not quite 1.0.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. Not quite. So I use to commute down to Oak Ridge when I was first down in Oak Ridge since the graphite reactor was the one I had done the nuclear design for. I was quite close to it. So that’s how I came to Oak Ridge in May of 1945, shortly before the war ended. Then of course started my whole episode of my whole experience in Oak Ridge.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, just back up one bit as far as history is concerned. I had heard about that possibility of having to go the U-233 route, but I don’t think it’s very adequately covered in the history.
DR. WEINBERG: No, it isn’t. It was an episode that lasted about a month or so.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. WEINBERG: But that was where Wigner came up with this idea of a plate like water moderated reactor as a thorium converter.
MR. LARSON: So I’m glad to get that because I have been unable to find… I’ve talk with some people.
DR. WEINBERG: Do they remember it?
MR. LARSON: Yes, but I think only one or two and others denied that they had ever heard of it.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yes. That happened.
MR. LARSON: So I’m very glad to get that little point of history clarified.
DR. WEINBERG: Well, at Oak Ridge, Harry Brown in the Chemistry Division there was interested in a small homogeneous reactor. Wigner had always thought that homogeneous reactors were the way to go for breeder reactors and when I came down to Oak Ridge, I said well, that’s really what you should be going after. I was working in the Physics Division at the time, and then when Wigner came down as the research director and this was in 1946. The Laboratory was still run by Monsanto. We realized that you couldn’t really do the homogeneous reactor without a great deal of experimental work and instead what you had to do was build a High Flux Reactor for them to do the experiments, the chemical experiments that were necessary to perform in order to get the information for a real homogeneous reactor. So design began on a 10,000 kilowatt heavy water moderator, light water cooled reactor using enriched uranium. Wigner came down as research director about that time and he pointed out that you have enough water in the coolant to moderate the neutrons, you really didn’t need the heavy water, so why don’t you just push the heavy water out and push the fuel elements together. In which case you would have the advantage not only of a very high slow neutron flux, but a very fast flux also, so that’s how the MTR was conceived, the cold heavy water reactor with the heavy water pushed out and the fuel elements pushed together.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. You had at that time enough enriched uranium to be able to do…
DR. WEINBERG: We did have enough enriched uranium to do it. Well the development of the MTR occurred simultaneously with Rickover’s coming to Oak Ridge. I became really quite friendly with Rickover. He spent better than a year and that’s where he learned about nuclear power.
MR. LARSON: Was that about 1947?
DR. WEINBERG: It was 1947, yes. And it was I who urged John Rickover that the way to make a nuclear powered submarine was with a high pressure water reactor because the year earlier, well I had been thinking about this for several years by this time. In 1946, one of my colleagues, a mathematician, Forrest Murray, and I had written a paper called, or a memorandum called, Pressurized Water as a Coolant and Moderator. We gave the possibilities for what later became the pressurized water reactor, just a short memorandum, about three or four pages long and I had made some calculations of what the thermo hydraulics would be and it looked like it would be a feasible thing to do. So, when Rickover came on the scene, we told him that was the way to make his submarine. First he was very reluctant to believe in it, but then one of his young lieutenants, very bright lieutenants, Naval lieutenants, looked at the matter, and sure enough there was Eli Roth and Lou Rhodes who later became very well known…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: And they decided there was something to it and so gradually Rickover got the message. Now president at the laboratory at the time was Harold Etherington, who had come down to head what was called the Daniels Pile, it was a gas cooled reactor and Harold Etherington saw the point. Sam Untermeyer was there and this was a time when zirconium was shown to be corrosion resistant by Sam Untermeyer and also that the [inaudible] was the reason zirconium caused the neutrons to be absorbed in the zirconium. People figured out how to get [inaudible] out. So this was indeed the way to make a submarine reactor and that really is how the submarine reactor got started. I’ve always been unhappy that one of the key actors in this whole pressurized water reactor for submarines has never really been given adequate credit and that was Harold Etherington.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I don’t know if you have ever met him.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. I distinctly remember meeting him.
DR. WEINBERG: He had [inaudible]. He came down along with many of the other people to this Oak Ridge [inaudible] technology.
MR. LARSON: As I remember he was such a competent engineer.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh tremendous.
MR. LARSON: He had a grasp of all of the facets of the whole thing.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, extremely able. He was the one who made the original decisions on how the things should be laid out. The idea of having the pressurized, the canned router pump was actually invented by Sam Untermeyer.
MR. LARSON: Oh is that right? I didn’t know that.
DR. WEINBERG: Yeah, and Sam, at the time, was Eugene Wigner’s assistant for engineering at the Laboratory. So the MTR was done about the same time as the submarine reactor. The MTR was originally an Oak Ridge project, but in 1948, word came from on high that Oak Ridge was going to be out of the reactor business. So there was a big fuss that went on for a long time there. Although that was the decision on high, it was obviously not a very consistent decision because they had GE in the reactor business and Argonne was in the reactor business and so it never was quite implemented that way.
MR. LARSON: Fortunately.
DR. WEINBERG: Well I don’t know, Clarence. I look back on it and I suppose if I had to do my life all over again Clarence, I would have spent far more of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s resources really solving the waste disposal problem because we look at where we are now and we ask what is the big problem? One of them is reactor safety and the other is waste disposal problem and you know as well as I do we could have stashed those nuclear wastes permanently 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
MR. LARSON: And in retrospect, if it had been done early and it been implemented early…
DR. WEINBERG: It’s insoluble. People would say look at all the waste that we are producing in our society, the one that we really are doing right is nuclear waste.
MR. LARSON: And if it had been implemented 10 years earlier would have been a full [inaudible].
DR. WEINBERG: And if I had any regrets it would be that. Well, so, about that time, Monsanto left and the University of Chicago was suppose to come back in, but they had trouble finding a director. I think they went through 15 or so names and nobody wanted to be the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was the most curious thing. Then Union Carbide came in, still nobody wanted to be the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Finally, one day Clark Center came to me, well actually to Nelson Rutger.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: Nelson Rutger when Carbide finally came in he was designated as the director and they said we’ll give you three choices, you can be the associate director, research director, or [inaudible] director, which do you want? I said, I’ll be the associate director. So there was Nelson Rutger as the director and I became the associate director of the laboratory. So that lasted for a while and then if we go off the record for a minute…
[Break in video]
DR. WEINBERG: You remember that?
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I don’t know if you knew that I said that to Clark.
MR. LARSON: Well essentially I gathered it.
DR. WEINBERG: So, well so, we then had us a major effort of the Laboratory to attempt to develop a breeder reactor, although the MTR was done as a joint project with Argonne and ORNL, but ORNL had the guts of it, the nuclear part, nuclear island I guess you call it now, and Argonne had all the rest. I guess the MTR must be regarded as having a tremendous influence on the whole of reactor design. Well much of, the general design that you lift the stuff up from the top, which seems like an obvious thing now, but that was shown to work on the MTR and the MTR was the first really high powered enriched uranium reactor.
MR. LARSON: So it really was the prototype for the submarine reactor and then later of course, our whole pressurized water industry.
DR. WEINBERG: Well, in a way although there the connection was a little more tenuous because the pressurized water reactors use low enrichment uranium. Of course, Karl Cohen was the one who really pushed that although all of us realize that you can do it that way with low enrichment. Then of course there was that period in which the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was heavily back in the reactor business trying to make homogeneous reactors work and then we were told by Larry Halsted who was the head of reactor development that well, you can if you want to work on homogeneous reactors, you also have to work on the aircraft reactor. Most of us did not really think that the aircraft reactor really could work, but we did feel that there was some interesting technology there that someday could be applied to other aspects of reactor development, and power development. I guess we were very fortunate to have gotten R.C. Bryant, Rave Bryant, a very brilliant chemical engineer to take over the aircraft project and we pursued this possibility of making the aircraft reactors with molten salts. Interesting, the molten salts some thought were an invention that came after the war. Actually Eugene Wigner had thought of using molten salts during the war.
MR. LARSON: Oh, actually that early?
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, but not seriously. He thought of almost every combination that I’ve talked about. Well, the Laboratory did operate two high temperature molten salt reactors, these reactors, I suppose you would have to say it was a miracle that they could operate at all, rather than they operated well. The second reactor operated very well, that was the molten salt reactor experiment, which was a 70 megawatt reactor. Well, let me go back… We did operate two homogeneous reactors, but as it turned out the chemical stability of the system was not really sufficient. It was really chemically unstable. So we finally gave up on the homogeneous reactor but every now and then people keep coming back to the idea because it’s such an attractive idea in principle, but in practice, it turned out to be really quite difficult. Although the chemical engineers at the time, at some time God smiles on chemical engineers when doing things that later would be regarded as crazy, but they get away with it. Of course when you think of the containment of the first homogeneous reactor it makes your hair stand on end. It didn’t have any real containment like [inaudible] pressure and we have many millions of impurities and a thousand pounds per square inch.
MR. LARSON: That was one of the problems and why you needed the high pressure.
DR. WEINBERG: Yeah the high pressure, and I suppose, what would you say, the high temperature is probably easier than the high pressure. Neither is simple. Well so then, as an outgrowth of the nuclear airplane, Rave Bryant always conceived a nuclear airplane which he always thought it would be a dodo, it wouldn’t fly. There would be a spin off which would be a molten salt based thermal breeder. H.G. MacPherson, who had been the director of research I guess, at Carbide at the time, was leaving Carbide and he decided to come to Oak Ridge. He hadn’t been there in 1948, and when he came to my office to talk about things I said, look there is this hot idea about using molten salts or thermal breeders, don’t you think you would be just the person to do it? Which he was because graphite became so essential, he became very excited about it. That was one of the best decisions I made I think, despite the fact that the project was eventually terminated. I still think that well eventually people will come back to this way of trying reactors.
MR. LARSON: Of course, it had great advantage in that it was lower pressure…
DR. WEINBERG: Lower pressure, but high temperature.
MR. LARSON: And by dropping the temperature from the aircraft requirements, you alleviated some of the materials.
DR. WEINBERG: Right. Well, so where did we stand then? By this time it was the mid-1960’s. The pressurized water reactor had gone to be sort of a commercial device. The Laboratory became a large powerful scientific institution, which was involved in all sorts of things. The most prestigious Biology Division under the leadership of Alexander Hollaender, had a very powerful chemical technology group under Floyd Cullers direction, perhaps one of the most important contributions from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was for many years a source of isotopes, radio isotopes for scientific production. I didn’t really have very much to do with the isotope production; I suppose I have to say I didn’t have that much to do with the work in chemical technology or in biology. I took sort of interest in all these things and we’d have these information meetings each year and I would attend these and try to act fairly intelligent and try to make sure that management was interested in what they were doing, because I often felt in a big research organization one of the problems that people might have is a feeling of anonymity, that nobody really much cares whether they are there or not there. So I tried hard to maintain that and I’m pleased that my successors at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have seen fit to continue these information meetings at the laboratory.
MR. LARSON: I think those information meetings have been probably also a source of dissemination throughout the country and the world.
DR. WEINBERG: Right.
MR. LARSON: And certainly had enhanced their reputation as an institution.
DR. WEINBERG: Well, I guess I have to say that as I look at the major successes at the Laboratory, it’s difficult for me to say what the most important success was. Perhaps the two most important successes were production of radio isotopes and I suppose the other important success was that the Laboratory really set the, well established the standard designs for most of the research reactors throughout the world.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: If you look at all the research reactors in the world 90 percent of them are really copies of what we first did at Oak Ridge. Well that seems like a small thing nowadays, but at that time, the very first time it was done, it wasn’t a small thing really, but a big thing. Many of us suffered plenty that first time that the MTR started and then it stopped earlier than we thought and then we had to figure out why it was stopping and so on. All these things that look easy are really quite hard at first, but then of course we had many, many spin offs. The Biology Division has been a marvelous spin off. The materials developments, for example, the spin offs from the nuclear aircraft were these alloys which have been the basis for a huge industry now. The Cabbot Company has become very rich as a result of the commercializing of an alloy that was developed during the AFP program.
MR. LARSON: Yes, the so called NR-8, I think.
DR. WEINBERG: Which I think is alcohol [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: But yes, and then also I believe that the chemical reprocessing methods which are still used today…
DR. WEINBERG: The standard chemical [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: …all developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
DR. WEINBERG: Most of the progress of today, waste disposal came from the Laboratory. I have to say that I am disappointed that we did not succeed in really convincing the public that waste disposal was a fully practical thing. The research reactor, the High Flux Isotope Reactor is still the most powerful research reactor in the world in many respects was built at Oak Ridge. Then the many accelerators, well Oak Ridge was where heavy ion physics got started by Alexander Zucker and you can point to many things like that. Though one would have to say that the Laboratory partly because its mandate wasn’t specifically power reactors was always a bit peripheral I guess to the mainstream of reactor development which was quickly taken over by industry. The Laboratory was very much involved of course with the safety reactor.
MR. LARSON: Well, it would be a continuation of hundreds of different problems at the Laboratory and was valued to establishing the technology of the power reactor.
DR. WEINBERG: Right, so that pretty much summarizes my career as the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I guess I should say that at the same time I had this position at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory I sort of had other careers going on the side, because I was asked to serve on the President’s Science Advisory Committee for three years, from 1959 to 1962. I guess during that one summer that I was working on this report of information I got to know your father pretty well, Jane, because he was working on information also in a different respect at the other end of the hall. Every now and then we’d get together and chat. He was rather enthusiastic about his scheme. The way I get, I didn’t take it quite as seriously as he did, I don’t know how you felt about it at the time.
MRS. LARSON: Which scheme was this?
MR. LARSON: Information, dear.
DR. WEINBERG: Remember he did that scheme for the…
MRS. LARSON: Oh for the library, the Library of Medicine. Yes.
DR. WEINBERG: Well…
MRS. LARSON: I think he was stepping into a very difficult area.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Into an area that still has not been solved.
DR. WEINBERG: Right, right. So as part of that career, I got interested in this whole question of science policy and how do you establish priorities in science. I wrote a number of papers which appeared in this little journal called Criteria for Scientific Choice, and that started sort of a growth industry in the science policy. I don’t know if I ask myself, well what really did you contribute in much of that stuff? Mostly I contributed as much as anything, the language which is not unimportant.
MR. LARSON: No, that‘s very important.
DR. WEINBERG: The word technological fix for example…
MR. LARSON: Yes, that’s right.
DR. WEINBERG: Or the word big science, that was something I cooked up. I would cook up these words and then they would sort of fit and people would use them. I would start people on writing learned papers on what was meant by these things. I’m amused here 20 years later that I’ve come back to that sort of philosophic discussion. The other career that I got launched on was in scientific information and I was chairman of this committee that wrote this paper on scientific information. It was called “Science Government and Information”. It’s still a rather standard work in information. Well, then I spent after I left the Laboratory, and if I look back on it I left at really just the right time. I don’t think I could have quite tolerated the present way in which the Laboratory’s relation to the Department of Energy has worked out. As I look back on it, well, I had a certain amount of freedom, not as much as perhaps I would like, but generally I think the Atomic Energy Commission was very supportive of the Laboratory. For a while I don’t think the Department of Energy has been quite that supportive, but I don’t really know that. So I spent a year in the Office of Energy Research and Development which was in the White House and then became a part of the Federal Energy Administration and we were thinking deep thoughts about energy at that time. We thought about such things as what do you do when nuclear energy falters now. We helped set up the Solar Energy Research Institute. That was an idea that came out of that office. I suppose the most important thing we did was we engineered, or helped engineer the transition from the Atomic Energy Commission to the…
MR. LARSON: ERDA, Energy Research and Development Administration.
DR. WEINBERG: Right and then at that time, I established the Institute for Energy Analysis which was suggested to me really by Phil Baker, former chairman of the Board of Bell Labs. He was very enthusiastic about it, so we got it going and it has been going for ten years now and we have done, well, had a number of fairly good ideas about what to do about the energy problem fundamentally and broadly. I guess there were two main thrusts to describe our position at the Institute for Energy Analysis as being somewhat right of center as compared to the position of most of the energy think tanks, which I regard as left of center. Now the right-left axis isn’t the usual communist-capitalist. It’s rather centralized versus decentralized, nuclear versus non-nuclear, electrical versus non-electrical, and the left thinks that the energy should be non-electrical, non-nuclear and non-central. The Right thinks it should be electrical, centralized and nuclear.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I think that though nuclear energy is in a bad state now then the market is showing us a different answer. We are continuing to move into electricity, we are continuing to find virtues in centralized electricity and I think that despite the [inaudible] experience, nuclear has got to get out of this.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it’s a matter of time and overcoming public perceptions and a lot of complicated economic factors that involve… which incidentally there are solutions for these things. It’s agonizing.
DR. WEINBERG: We don’t know everything. One of the points now is that these nuclear plants can last 100 years rather than 40. We build these big concrete devices and they can well last for 100 years. If it lasts for 100 years then we have already paid for it. Operating costs are very low and it produces that cheap electricity that you have now. So when electricity goes through a high, it eventually goes through a low again and that has to be factored into all of this.
MR. LARSON: Yes. As soon as 20 years are up the capital costs go down drastically.
DR. WEINBERG: Like Norris Dam, we paid for it, so we get the electricity for five mil per kilowatt hour at Norris Dam.
MR. LARSON: So, things you can see can change around and that’s what I was going to lead into. I remember you always use to make a lot of predictions, scientific and reactors and a lot of other things. In fact, you were very bold in making several $1 bets, or $5 bets as to what would take place one year, three years, or five years, and so I was wondering if you could dip into your crystal ball and what are some of the directions you feel…
DR. WEINBERG: Well, let me say…
MR. LARSON: …that things will take place.
DR. WEINBERG: …generally, I tended to bet optimistically on the state of the world and pessimistically on the achievements of technology because I think the achievement of nuclear power and then the space achievements have spoiled people into believing that everything is simple. In particular, my view is pessimistic on fusion. Now I may be shown to be totally wrong on this, but it just seems to me a very difficult technology, far more difficult than reactors really and probably far more expensive. I guess I continue therefore to be pessimistic about solar energy. Not that I don’t think we should be working on it, we should be working on it. I don’t really see a clear resolution on the storage problem. So, [inaudible] maybe it will turn out to be.
MR. LARSON: And the sheer problem with space required.
DR. WEINBERG: And the problem with space, then of course some of the ideas are crazy, I mean the solar satellite is really quite stupid because all you’re solving there is a storage problem because the sun is always shinning up there and there are a half dozen ways of solving the storage problem on earth that are cheaper than that and are still expensive to compete with nuclear power. Now the problems that we are having with nuclear power now are very real but I cannot believe that they are anything but transitory because you look at other countries and they don’t have these same problems. France doesn’t have these same problems. Are we more stupid than France? Russians don’t have these problems. The Swiss don’t have these same problems.
MR. LARSON: So, you would be optimistic, well due to the fact that we apparently can solve as far as technological fixes to the problem. It looks like it’s very possible. In fact, these other countries have demonstrated…
DR. WEINBERG: Right.
MR. LARSON: So what remains to be is public perception which will pass of course.
DR. WEINBERG: Right. So I see as far as the energy future is concerned, Clarence, in the future, is going to be a very heavily electrical energy future. And on this I disagree in the deepest way with energy revolutionaries like Barry Commoner and Emory Lovins with whom I often argue. I think they are just wrong as the day is long. They mistake decentralization of the energy production with decentralization in reduced electricity is exquisitely capable of decentralizing end use.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: And that is more important than decentralizing the mode of production which is awkward, expensive, time consuming. No way.
MR. LARSON: And the economics just can’t possibly…
DR. WEINBERG: I don’t see how it can work. I don’t see how it can. Well, we’ve gone I don’t know, a long time, I don’t know if this is all what you wanted.
MR. LARSON: If you have I think there is…
DR. WEINBERG: Are there other things you want me to talk about?
MR. LARSON: Well, there is only one thing you’ve done, of course a tremendous amount of thinking with regard to the directions the world should take so far as coming to grips with the nuclear threats to the world...
DR. WEINBERG: Well…
MR. LARSON: …including proliferation.
DR. WEINBERG: …if you would like I can talk a few minutes about…
MR. LARSON: If you could talk on that…
DR. WEINBERG: Let me just say two things. One, I think that the connection between nuclear power and proliferation is very much exaggerated. And I think that there are additional things that can be done. For example, I think that a take back scheme ought to be instituted, where you take the spent fuel back and this is not much of a hardship because it’s turned out that because the price of the breeder has gone up and the price of uranium has gone up also, the time when we would need the breeder has been pushed into the future and therefore the incentive for doing reprocessing isn’t as great as if we used these things. So I don’t know, we have 20, 30 years to do other things and I think the most sensible thing to do is have the United States say either take title to all its fuel and simply lease it so it comes back or require that all the spent fuel come back to the United States. Use essentially the same scheme that the Soviet Union is using, where they insist on taking all the fuel back.
MR. LARSON: And that seems to be 100 percent successful…
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. One hundred percent successful and it solves for these other countries the problem of waste disposal.
MR. LARSON: Which is one of the things that is mutually satisfactory to both countries.
DR. WEINBERG: And then with respect to the proliferation of nuclear weapons which is by far the most important problem that the world is facing. I should go back a moment and say that Eugene Wigner came back to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; I guess it was the early ‘60’s to institute a program on civil defense. I became very influenced by his thinking and have been racking my brain for 20 years or more for how do you deal with the arms race, the arms confrontation and is there some configuration other than mutually insured destruction. About 18 years ago I gave a speech called “Let Us Prepare for Peace”, which I said true disarmament, total disarmament, does not come from a posture of strong defense because you wouldn’t trust them if you knew they had a weapon. But people were not ready to listen then, but here it is in 1984, President Reagan has made his famous Star Wars speech on March 23, 1983, I think the whole issue is being reopened and I think there are some possibilities now that are getting very serious attention. The one that, a young colleague of mine, Jack Parsons is proposing that we are very enthusiastic about we are hoping will be taken serious is this thing called the Defense Protective Build Down. This is an idea where by you deploy defensive weapons initially within the ABM treaty. The United States deploys defensive weapons which protect its first strike weapons, the MXs, but because they are now protected, they are less vulnerable to a strike from the Soviets, and therefore you don’t need as many of them to have the same second strike capability and therefore at the same time you deploy your defense you can without reducing your second strike capability reduce the number of offensive weapons. That is you compensate, you reduce your offensive first strike weapons by an amount that compensates for the amount of defense that you put up which can prevent the first strike from the other guy from wiping you out.
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s a practical step by step…
DR. WEINBERG: Right. I have been trying to promote this in articles recently published for foreign policy along these lines, creating a fair amount of discussion. At least it’s a new idea and this remarkable book called Weapons and Hope suggests that weapons and ideas of this genre are right for serious consideration. So some of us are seriously considering devoting a good deal of our time and attention to exactly this question.
MR. LARSON: It really is not totally inconsistent with the so called Star Wars…
DR. WEINBERG: No, it’s very much in that line. I think that Defense Secretary Weinberger I don’t think was justified in promising total defense with any degree to Star Wars. I don’t think [inaudible]
MR. LARSON: Of course it is, there is a little bit of an analogy there, but the bullet proof vests for police men are not 100 percent but they certainly, they help save a large number of lives.
DR. WEINBERG: So I don’t know, maybe that will change the terms of the discussion. I look forward to it being pretty exciting and you know I’m only going on 70 years old, Clarence, so I’m just ready to get going on this. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. This is wonderful. I’m sure there will be a lot of discussion on this in the future.
DR. WEINBERG: Let’s hear a little bit of the sound…
MR. LARSON: This has been marvelous and I think that this concludes…
[End of Interview]

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PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ALVIN WEINBERG
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
1984
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
DR. WEINBERG: …Clarence and Jane to have an opportunity to talk to you. I guess I will tell you things about myself that you probably don’t know, although among the close friends that I have, I guess, our lives have intersected as closely as any.
MR. LARSON: That’s right and for an extended period…
DR. WEINBERG: People don’t realize perhaps that you were my boss for oh, what was it? Almost 15 years, I guess at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That actually, you were a very close friend of my sister and brother-in-law, long before I knew that you existed.
MR. LARSON: That’s right. I look back very fondly on those days.
DR. WEINBERG: Let me start with my early recollections of myself. I was born in Chicago. My parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who came to this country around 1908. The atmosphere in our house was, as was the case with most Russian Jewish immigrants who came at that time, were really quite intellectual. They encouraged us for example; my sister and I, and I do have an older sister, about 5 years older than I, the atmosphere was one which placed a premium on intellectual excellence. We were required to take piano lessons for example although I hated to play the piano at the time; I have kept with it all my 69 years. Now I enjoy it very much and am grateful to my mother for having beaten on me to keep playing the piano. And of course my sister had a very strong influence on me. She was again, the sort of person who was very bright and she of course had to be the head of her class always and I was the kid brother and I always had to emulate my sister. People would say, when you grow up you might do as well as your sister, Fay did. And I think that my sister had a very strong influence on me in my very early days. My father was in the clothing manufacturing business. He was the manager of a factory that manufactured women’s dresses. He was in that business…
MR. LARSON: And he was in Chicago?
DR. WEINBERG: This was in Chicago, yes. I went to school, grammar school in Chicago and also high school and I guess I first had the idea that I might have a scientific career, I suppose very early in life, although I didn’t really know exactly, I really quite, can’t reconstruct exactly how I came to it. It may have been when I was 8 or 9 years old I became a Lone Scout. The Lone Scouts were scouts, who didn’t belong to a real troop, but they were given a handbook and you were allowed to do things by yourself, on your own. Somehow I got involved with some of the, my friends at the time, we would do little experiments according to the book.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course in scouting they have well defined projects and experiments.
DR. WEINBERG: It wasn’t all that well defined quite at that time as I recall, but I think that that perhaps moved me somewhat in that direction. I suppose another thing was that very early because my sister was older than I, our family bought the “Book of Knowledge”. The “Book of Knowledge” was a book of standards, an encyclopedia in those days. You probably know what I’m talking about.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I love that “Book of Knowledge”. I just would read it, and read it, and read it. I guess I learned an awful lot reading the “Book of Knowledge”. Then I remember my parents bought me a chemistry set for Christmas on time. I loved to do experiments. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but it did sort of orient me toward science. Then I suppose a little bit later, I may have been in the ninth grade or seventh grade at the time, I somehow got hold of a book, “Schlossmann’s Creative Chemistry”.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes, that’s a very famous book.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s right. This was a book in which he talked about advances in chemical technology as we would call it. The chemical industry and I was much intrigued by it. Somehow I thought at that time, I thought that I would become a chemical engineer, although I wasn’t very sure what a chemical engineer was.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, in interviewing many people, particularly people like Teller, and several others who have become physicists later, they started out in chemistry because they didn’t see how they could make a living in physics.
DR. WEINBERG: I moved into physics for a less lofty reason which I will come to shortly, Clarence. Well, then I went to high school and I was a very good student in high school. I also again following in the footsteps of my sister became the editor of our newspaper. I was the editor of our newspaper for a whole year. I guess if I ask myself what talents really do bring in there, I suppose to some degree it’s a talent for articulating things and I think that probably goes back to when I was the editor of our newspaper. As a matter of fact I had been, again, following in the footsteps of my sister, of course she had been the editor of the newspaper, I had been the editor of our junior high school newspaper and it was at that time, I was in the seventh grade I believe and the editor at the junior high school, that I had my first experience in causing the powers that be a great deal of trouble because of something that I had written. It was something like this that we had an assembly and in those days the students would get together and the principal would get up and we’d have an assembly. The principal gave a stirring lecture on why the girls at the school should not use so much lipstick and rouge. So I wrote an editorial which I called “Watch the War Paint”. When the dean of students saw that editorial in our junior high school newspaper, she was fit to be tied. The reason being was our newspaper circulated throughout the Chicago school system and it ill behooved or ill became the dean of students at our junior high school to have it be known that at the Hipper Junior High School, which was the school I attended, were fallen women using all that war paint. So, all hell broke loose. I guess by that time I was about ready to graduate, so they didn’t have to demote me from being the editor of our newspaper, but that sort of in a way been the story of my life I guess. I always say a little more than I should, and people get very angry at me.
MR. LARSON: That’s remarkable. I’m reminded that one of the other people that I interviewed with, Dr. White, who is now the head of the National Academy of Engineering…
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yes, Bob White.
MR. LARSON: …and he spent a whole year after he graduated from college as a newspaper reporter. He said that was one of the most valuable experiences of his life because he learned how to articulate and write things so that people could understand. So this is interesting with regard to your experience in high school with the newspaper.
DR. WEINBERG: In high school, I was a very good student. I think I graduated third in a class of about 700 students and I took, no, I didn’t take biology, but I took all of the other sciences that were available then and all the mathematics. I must confess that I didn’t understand physics when I studied physics in high school. I’ve often wondered why that was and I guess I decided that it wasn’t entirely my fault, although I guess it really indicated that I wasn’t and I have never regarded myself as a, really talented in science. What I know in science and the few things I’ve accomplished in science I’ve always felt have always come hard to me. I’ve always had to work harder than other people, but I do feel, to some degree that I must mitigate my lack of success in science by the fact that at that time, we didn’t really have a person who understood physics teaching physics. I look back now and the fellow, who was teaching physics, at the same time, he was teaching high school physics, was taking the elementary college course in physics at night. He was about one paragraph ahead of the class. So I never could quite understand what the thing was quite about. I passed the physics class all right, with a good grade, but it wasn’t nearly as good, I would get a 98s and so on in chemistry. I did great in chemistry. The fellow that taught chemistry was a good chemist, well he understood chemistry, not so in physics. I guess I in later years often contrasted that experience which I had in the…
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DR. WEINBERG: Excuse me.
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DR. WEINBERG: …as very poor science instruction that was available in the Chicago high school, well this was Roosevelt High School at the time with a remarkable science and mathematics instruction than some of my mentors like Eugene Wigner had in Hungary and Budapest. Eugene Wigner has often said to me that he attended in Budapest the high school, which at the time was probably the best high school in the world. The science and mathematics teachers there were doing research in science and mathematics and he often contributes his, of course he’s profoundly and tremendously talented, innately, but also often attributes his success in science to the marvelous, marvelous underpinning that he received as a youngster in this Lutheran high school in Budapest.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, I believe there were several other famous men that attended high school...
DR. WEINBERG: At that high school there was [Leo] Szilard, [John] Von Neumann, and Wigner, and they went to school together at that Lutheran high school in Budapest and they taught each other, but they also had these marvelous teachers. One mathematics teacher in particular who was able enough to recognize Von Neumann as a great genius and helped him along. I guess Teller came along a little bit later.
MR. LARSON: That’s right. That’s a remarkable story. Such a concentration of genius in one small area in one brief period of time.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. Well as I think about it, I guess I would say that I learned a good deal in high school, didn’t learn very much science actually, learned some chemistry, a little bit of physics, a fair amount of mathematics. I do remember trigonometry, but at that time, we never heard of a derivative or calculus.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well that was standard, higher algebra and trigonometry, was as far as you would go in high school.
DR. WEINBERG: Right, right. I actually skipped several grades through high school. so when I graduated high school I had just turned 16. Sometimes I think that that was a big disadvantage as far as I was concerned, because then when I went on to the University of Chicago, I was really too young so that I never felt comfortable socially at the University of Chicago. All the time I was there.
MR. LARSON: Being 16 that meant that you were perhaps, at least, one to two years younger than the others.
DR. WEINBERG: Yeah, I imagine that so many of the people you have interviewed had that experience that they went through the elementary school and the high school quicker than most so they came and had this disadvantage when they went to college. They were you know, a little bit out of it socially.
MR. LARSON: That’s right.
DR. WEINBERG: Well…
MR. LARSON: Apparently it wasn’t too much of a disadvantage, except socially as you say at that time.
DR. WEINBERG: I never felt terribly happy at college I guess, probably for that reason. Well then the Depression hit just as I graduated from high school which was 1931, and I entered the University of Chicago. I did not get a scholarship my first year at the University of Chicago. They had entrance examinations. I took the entrance examination in physics and I did not understand physics very well, so I didn’t do well enough on the physics examination to get a scholarship. I did get scholarships after one year at the University of Chicago, else I wouldn’t be able to stay at the university because my father by that time was out of a job and well it was pretty rough. We’d find places where you could get a nice meal for 10 cents.
MR. LARSON: Well, that was universal; you managed to get along…
DR. WEINBERG: Yes.
MR. LARSON: …under these very stringent circumstances.
DR. WEINBERG: Then I came to the University of Chicago when the so-called New Plan of Robert Hutchins was instituted. I must say that was the most powerful, the best educational experience that anybody could have possibly have had.
MR. LARSON: How do you characterize that in a few words?
DR. WEINBERG: The general idea was that you were exposed to all branches of knowledge. So you took a one year course in the biological sciences, I enjoyed it tremendously. I’d never had any biological sciences. You took a one year course in the social sciences, a one year course in humanities, and a one year course in the physical sciences, because I had opted for a chemistry major, it wasn’t necessary for me to take the physical science course because I took other courses, but the other three in biological, social, and the humanities, I did take the courses and they were just extraordinary, very tough courses. I had to work very hard at them. I had to read everything, but I think that they gave me a better preparation than almost anybody could have, well as good a preparation as anybody else at the University of Chicago. Our class was really quite an extraordinary class. My class mates, some came later, some came about that same time, there was Paul Samuelson, who got the Nobel Prize in economics, then there was Herb Simon…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: …he was one of my classmates. It was a very active and edifying intellectual environment that we had there. Well…
MR. LARSON: Presumably the professors were good enough to do this properly.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yes. The difference in the university and the high school is enormous. I mean everybody, all of the university professors knew what they were talking about. No question that they knew more than you did. But also the students were so good and that was a very edifying although sometimes sobering experience. You come to college and you’re at the top of your class and then you find others who were at the top of their class. Then it’s not so easy to be at the top of the class. Well I was planning at that time to major in chemistry although I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, possibly be a chemistry teacher, possibly at high school and college. Turned out that and I never quite understood that totally, although I did very well in the elementary chemistry, when I came to organic chemistry I was told that I wasn’t very handy in the laboratory.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: Now I have often thought about that and often wondered myself if I, should I have accepted that or should I not have accepted that. Had I not accepted that I think I probably could have become handy in laboratory, but the professor, his name was Gladfeld, I remember, he said, “Well, I think you ought to do something other than chemistry.” So I thought a while and decided that maybe in physics I would do better. Although I got very good grades, I got A’s in all the courses, but somehow, I didn’t make much of an impression as a laboratory chemist.
MR. LARSON: In laboratory organic chemistry, you have to have superb teachers who have intuitive feel for techniques to impart, otherwise it’s very difficult.
DR. WEINBERG: I guess so, although the other people would get 80 percent yields in their preparations, I would get 10 percent yields or something like that. Was it because I was too impatient? I don’t know. I know my father always, he always had wanted to be an engineer, but he never did make it being an engineer, but he always took delight in doing things with his hands and making things work and so on. So as I say, had I pursued it, I think I could have managed it, but I’ll never know. So I switched to physics and I found physics hard, not easy, but I did very well in it. Large part I suppose was because I worked hard at it and at the same time, I took lots of mathematics. I really had a double major in mathematics and in physics. I graduated, I guess I was at the top of the graduating class, or well at that time, they had these comprehensive examinations and you had to take, what was it? Six comprehensive examinations in the general courses and then two comprehensive examinations, or one very major comprehensive examination in your major, which was physics. I got A as a top grade in all of the examinations, except physics. Physics I got a C. I was very depressed. I thought, gee, there is something wrong. Then there was one of my fellow students, he got I don’t know, a D or something. So he complained to the management and so they decided that they would look at the examinations again and it turned out that they had made an error in grading the examinations. So the upshot was that I got an A in it. So I got straight A’s in everything. By this time I did have, I was given a scholarship because I was very poor and also, I became an NYA student. You remember the National Youth Administration had these jobs. The job…
MR. LARSON: That was certainly a great help to the students.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yeah, the job I had was to analyze the literature, German literature in a classics library, what that meant was that I would go through these old volumes of textual criticism of ancient Greek texts. It was all written in German, German journals. And I would make an abstract of each one of these and that would go in the card file. It was called analyzing the journals. So I, in a curious sort of way, I learned about Greek and Roman literature this way. I hated the job and yet I guess I learned something at the job, but I suppose it characterized much of what I did. I would always sort of get involved in things other than what I was suppose to be doing. Well, so I graduated, I guess I graduated with honors I think that’s what they called it. I decided by then that I would go into physics and by that time I also became friendly with professor Carl Eckart, who later became one of the foremost oceanographers, theoretical oceanographers and head of the Scripps Institute [of Oceanography] and he of course had a great influence on my, on my future career. I worked with him on a problem in theoretical physics on, well, it was a quantum mechanical, the Hamiltonian of the carbon dioxide molecule, which again it’s sort of funny that it proves again that anything you do in the past, later on it will be helpful to you, no matter what it is. It’s sort of funny that this was in 1935, 1936 and here it is almost 50 years later and I’ve been pretty much involved in the whole question of the greenhouse effect, which is caused by carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide greenhouse effect is caused by the absorption of the carbon dioxide molecule in these three different bands, which of course correspond to the three different fundamental vibrations of carbon dioxide and then I go back 50 years and remember that that is what I had worked on 50 years ago. So it all sort of fits together in a strange and curious sort of way.
MR. LARSON: Let’s see. You were really exposed to quantum mechanics at that time. It was just really getting into the universities about then.
DR. WEINBERG: 1935. Yes. 1935.
MR. LARSON: Of course it had a great development in the ‘20’s but I guess it didn’t quite get into the university teaching until the 1930’s.
DR. WEINBERG: The book we used was one of the first books. There were two books that we used. One by Hal Hepburn and the other by Linus Pauling, well Pauling and Wilson, E. Bright Wilson who worked at the technical library with Pauling. That’s where I really learned quantum mechanics and Carl Eckart was my teacher and he was my professor. My career took a rather curious turn because I got interested, in fact I was enchanted I suppose by a strange Russian who was a Rockefeller’s fellow at Chicago and then became professor. His name was Nicholas Rashevsky, and Rashevsky was the one who was proposing to create a theoretical structure, a mathematical, theoretical structure for biology…
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DR. WEINBERG: Excuse me.
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DR. WEINBERG: these ideas for creating mathematical theoretical structure in biology and I was simply enchanted by all this. So I along with some of my theoretically inclined friends in the physics department at Chicago decided that we would throw our lot in with him. So I became a mathematical biophysicist. I helped Rashevsky start the field of mathematical biophysics along with other people of course. That meant that along with my physics degree I had to have a degree in biology. So I went back and took courses in experimental physiology and botany and oh, I must have taken four or five courses in various aspects of physiology. Actually did experiments on dogs and I rather enjoyed it. I spent the years I guess from 1936 until about ‘41, ‘42, as a mathematical biophysicist. Some of the things I did then looking back on it now were pretty naïve, but some of the things I’m still not ashamed of.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well of course you’ve been applying mathematics to a very complex biological system. It really strains your resources.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, of course at that time the whole enterprise was not regarded as being terribly, which I say, terribly serious. They thought it was a contradiction in terms to have mathematical biology, but Rashevsky was a man of infinite optimism, infinite imagination. He was very industrious and he kept the pot bubbling. He started his own journal that was sort of a house organ called the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics and our little group would publish in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. I was involved in two aspects of the work. One was the problem with periodicities in biological systems and the other was the problem of nerve conduction, nerve excitation, nerve conduction. As I look back on what myself was able to do, I was rather naïve, I guess of some of the ideas that were in these early papers on nerve conduction have to some degree survived and even are referred to occasionally, although the theory has been superseded by the remarkable work done by Hodgkins Huxley for which they got the Nobel Prize in 1952. But as far as the other work was concerned, my doctorial work was based on analysis of certain periodicities in biological systems, I didn’t realize until very much later that we were nibbling at that considerations that underlay the work of [Viscount Ilya] Prigogine. Prigogine who was the founder really, one of the founders of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and it was he who formulated problems of the same character as the ones we did, but he carried them very much further and I was amazed, though I had not followed Prigogine’s work, I was only dimly aware of it, I was amazed about 10 years ago when I was at a meeting in Romania of all places, the European Physical Society to hear one of Prigogine’s disciples give a talk and he started with a set of equations which were for all the world identical to the equations that I had considered 35 years earlier when I was working with Rashevsky. So in a sense what I had done there then, well I didn’t think all that much of it, actually was in the same direction as this work that Prigogine finally brought to fruition. Of course Prigogine won the Nobel Prize, oh, a half a dozen years ago for his work that he had done. So I was involved then as a biophysicist working on problems that had to do with the diffusion of materials in and out of cells.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. So this must have laid the foundation for your work in reactor theory.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s exactly correct because then what happened was, well, 1939 came along and yes, I heard about fission again we were a bit disappointed because again one of my colleagues Gail Young who later came to the Oak Ridge Naitonal Laboratory had been talking about the fissioning along with Rashevsky the fissioning of cells and mathematically the problem was identical to the problem of the fissioning of the uranium nucleus.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: But at that time those two communities were intellectually completely separate. So there is no one who knew about the fissioning of cells and also knew about the separations of the Bohr liquid drop model. Had they done so it’s conceivable that Gail Young may have anticipated the discovery of the fission of uranium, but that’s after the fact it looks easier than before the fact, of course. But the work that I did with Rashevsky was done also in collaboration with Carl Eckart. He followed my work very closely and so when, well shortly before the war broke out, I think this was in late 1941, shortly before the war when the US was involved. At the time I was a research associate working for Rashevsky I was asked by Carl Eckart if I would join him for six months half time to work on this very farfetched possibility of making nuclear energy. I should explain that by 1940, I had decided that mathematical biology could only go so far. To make further progress one would have to do experimental work and so I had made arrangements to work with Kenneth S. Cole, KS Cole, who was in my view the foremost biophysicist in neurophysiology and I received an NRC fellowship to work with Cole, but then the war came along just as I was about to take the fellowship. My life would have been totally different had I taken that fellowship. I would have been a neurophysiologist and had fun with nerves. But instead I came to work with Carl Eckart and he said the diffusion of neutrons and the diffusion of cells are not too different a problem, so why don’t you just help work on the diffusion of neutrons. So I began work part time but by the time of Pearl Harbor, I had begun, well shortly after Pearl Harbor, I worked full time, I think I joined the work full time, although I had been working part time, I think it was January 1942. I had been working three or four months with Carl Eckart before that on problems involved with neutron diffusion. Then Carl Eckart announced that he was going to leave to work on underwater sound at the laboratory in La Jolla, in San Diego. That was a great disappointment to me because I wondered how anybody could be as bright as Carl Eckart, as competent as Carl Eckart. Eckart said, “Don’t worry. Eugene Wigner is going to come.” Of course I had heard about Eugene Wigner as this great formidable physicist, and then I will never forget the first time I met this famous man at that time, the work on the chain reaction was established in Chicago under Compton’s edict and Wigner was in Princeton and he would commute between Chicago and Princeton. During his stay, his short five or six day stays he would have a succession of young people who were working on the problems and he would meet them at all hours of the day or night and I remember the very first time I met him. I was in the mathematics building, it was called Eckart Hall in Chicago and I with great fear and trepidation showed him what I was doing. I was working on a problem of the multiplication of beryllium due to neutrons and I guess I never have gotten over my awe of Eugene Wigner in the ‘50’s, 45 years that have elapsed since that time. I never really met anyone with that extraordinary mathematical and physical power that he displayed. I’d never met anyone like that. I always thought that Carl Eckart was the brightest physicist I ever met and here I saw someone that was even brighter. It was unbelievable to me to have, well I guess it had a tremendous effect on my ego. How could anyone do anything that this guy would consider was at all worthwhile? So that’s how I first met Eugene Wigner. Of course he’s had more influence on me as many other scientists have had enormous influence because I gradually became his assistant in two respects. On the one hand his assistant in charge of the nuclear design of the chain reactors but also I guess he got to like me as a person somehow and would somehow depend on me to help him keep all of the prima donnas who were working with him happy. Well they were young prima donnas, but they were young never the less. I would often intercede to sort of smooth things out. He would depend on me for this. He would ask me for advice for things of that sort.
MR. LARSON: So essentially, you had to plunge right into the analysis and design of the nuclear reactors.
DR. WEINBERG: Even though I didn’t know anything about nuclear physics, so it was really a quick learn on my part. All I knew was something about classical diffusion theory and I was great on Bessel’s functions which turned out to be kind of useful. But he put me in charge then, well after showing me how you make the calculation on, for the multiplication constant. He put me in charge of the multiplication constant. He must realize that in those days before the first chain reaction had been established it was a real question whether the multiplication constant for ordinary uranium and graphite could be made chain reacting at all. I was the one who had to keep track of all the experiments that Fermi was doing, analyze them and then convert them into a recipe and estimate for what the Hanford reactor itself would look like. So that really was my main job at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. I did, well I remember one thing that I did which I suppose persuaded Wigner that I was able to do something as he was not quite sure how much I could do at that time. He gave me the problem of computing the flow of neutrons through empty channels. See if you have control rods in a big reactor, then the rods are empty channels and neutrons would stream through these channels and it was a bit of a calculation how much of that streaming would be. I was able to make that calculation and I think he was visibly relieved that one of his younger people was able to make the calculation. Ordinarily, he would do all the calculations himself and I remember after he saw the result that I got, he looked at it and said, “Oh yes, yes, of course. That must be the result.” I was very relieved that I had gotten somehow the correct result and then I remember shortly thereafter I went to see Fermi and he said, “Oh yes, I computed that independently,” and he showed me how he computed it in about one line, where it took me about four pages to make the computation. Well…
MR. LARSON: Well, in other words you have to be more or less in daily contact with the experimental results of the multiplication experiments…
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. Yes these were the so called exponential experiments and these were done successively, approximating more and more the actual Hanford reactor and at each stage, I was supposed to analyze those results and see what they implied as far as the actual production reaction was concerned. In the course of this work, I was asked to do the nuclear design for a pilot plant that was going to be built in Oak Ridge and that of course was the X-10 reactor and that was something that was sort of done on the side. It was not a big deal by that time, I think [inaudible]. So, the chain reaction was then completed on December 2, 1942, just about three weeks later the design that Wigner and his group had carried through for the original plutonium producing reactor was completed. It was the famous CE-407 was the number [inaudible] engineering design of water cooled 250 megawatt water cooled graphite moderated reactor. That was the basic design for the Hanford reactor, the basic design which was taken over by DuPont and built into the plutonium producing reactors at Hanford.
MR. LARSON: Was there some controversy with regard to the coolant at first that you had to resolve?
DR. WEINBERG: When I first joined the project there was a big controversy because the engineers wanted to cool the reactor with helium and Fermi was inclined toward helium. Wigner said you would never get helium to work in this short time schedule because the temperatures were too high and material problems would be intractable in such short time. He was right. So single handedly he was able to turn the entire project around. I have often wondered why he was able to do it and I’ve often said that the reason he was able to do it was because of, he was the only person or almost the only person in the whole project who combined a great skill as a nuclear physicist with a great skill as an engineer. Wigner was of course a chemical engineer with training and he was the only one who commanded both of those duties. So he was able to see both the engineering and physics aspects and make the compromises in multiplication that were necessary to go for water cooling.
MR. LARSON: In retrospect, if it had gone the helium route it might have delayed…
DR. WEINBERG: It would have taken much longer. It’s doubtful the plutonium project would have been built on time. It was a great decision that Wigner made. And the DuPont people saw it and they came in at first in favor of heavy water reactors and gas cooled and then they came around to the water cooled graphite reactors. Well, so, in the meantime and alongside the work that was aimed simply at the Hanford reactors I conducted research along with Wigner of course on the other possible ways of making chain reactions and we studied all sorts of ways. One of the ways that we studied and I did this in collaboration with Robert Christy who later was one of the inventors of the enclosed bomb.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: …at Los Alamos, but he was at Chicago at the time. And we did calculations on the use of water as a moderator and as a coolant. I guess that is how I first got interested in the possibility of water both as a moderator and as a coolant. Well then after the Hanford reactors were built, well we had this period in which they were being built, we had all sorts of problems that would arise, one for example well I remember meeting in Compton’s office with Fermi and Wigner around Christmas of 1943. By then we had word that the Germans were working on this. So Wigner went up to the blackboard and showed that the Germans might have the bomb by Christmas of 1944. Wrote it down how long it would take to do this that and the other, of course he was implicitly making the assumption that everybody on the German project was as smart as Eugene Wigner and that of course was not correct.
MR. LARSON: Well, they had Heisenberg who was very smart…
DR. WEINBERG: And he wasn’t an engineer. He didn’t have much aptitude or interest in this type of heavy engineering Eugene took great delight in actually. He didn’t think it quite possible for this war, whereas Szilard, Wigner, more than any others on the project really thought it was possible, and of course Ernest Lawrence thought that it was possible. Well, so one of the difficulties that they encountered was when we discovered that plutonium 240 had a huge spontaneous fission yield and there for the plutonium that was made at Hanford might not work.
MR. LARSON: That must have been a devastating finding.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, it was terrible. It occurred rather late. I think it was early in 1944 and people were thinking is it possible to take the plutonium out of the Hanford reactors and convert it to U-233. It was at this time that the idea of small compact water reactors was thought of. It was Wigner that suggested it and these reactors were in configuration not very different from reactors that have since been built with water moderation. Well, I continued to help out in the improvements in the design while we worked on the disposition of the control rods at Hanford and the Hanford project was finally on its way and we were able to start thinking about longer range aspects of nuclear power. We did this at the so called New Piles Committee, which met about ten times in late ’44 and early ’45. At these meetings people would offer ideas for new kinds of reactors. About this time, also I had been contacted by the Navy and they began showing some interest in submarine reactors and I believe this was the first time I suggested to them a way to do the nuclear Navy was a pressurized water reactor. This was still during the war.
MR. LARSON: That was before the war ended.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, before the war ended, yes.
MR. LARSON:’45.
DR. WEINBERG: I think it was Admiral Mills who was involved with it. Well, about this time, shortly before the war ended, plans were being made for what to do after the war and Wigner got the idea of moving the group to Oak Ridge and building a great laboratory, a nuclear energy laboratory in Oak Ridge. In light of this idea, I moved down to Oak Ridge. Now Oak Ridge at this time was doing experiments on light water reactor lattices, largely at my suggestion because I had been interested in light water and we were quite amazed that light water with ordinary uranium almost was chain reactant. Had it been chain reacting, of course, our faces would have been very red because why did we have to go to all the trouble of getting graphite, if you could do it with light water. You couldn’t quite do it with light water.
MR. LARSON: It was .98 or something like that.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Not quite 1.0.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. Not quite. So I use to commute down to Oak Ridge when I was first down in Oak Ridge since the graphite reactor was the one I had done the nuclear design for. I was quite close to it. So that’s how I came to Oak Ridge in May of 1945, shortly before the war ended. Then of course started my whole episode of my whole experience in Oak Ridge.
MR. LARSON: Incidentally, just back up one bit as far as history is concerned. I had heard about that possibility of having to go the U-233 route, but I don’t think it’s very adequately covered in the history.
DR. WEINBERG: No, it isn’t. It was an episode that lasted about a month or so.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. WEINBERG: But that was where Wigner came up with this idea of a plate like water moderated reactor as a thorium converter.
MR. LARSON: So I’m glad to get that because I have been unable to find… I’ve talk with some people.
DR. WEINBERG: Do they remember it?
MR. LARSON: Yes, but I think only one or two and others denied that they had ever heard of it.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh yes. That happened.
MR. LARSON: So I’m very glad to get that little point of history clarified.
DR. WEINBERG: Well, at Oak Ridge, Harry Brown in the Chemistry Division there was interested in a small homogeneous reactor. Wigner had always thought that homogeneous reactors were the way to go for breeder reactors and when I came down to Oak Ridge, I said well, that’s really what you should be going after. I was working in the Physics Division at the time, and then when Wigner came down as the research director and this was in 1946. The Laboratory was still run by Monsanto. We realized that you couldn’t really do the homogeneous reactor without a great deal of experimental work and instead what you had to do was build a High Flux Reactor for them to do the experiments, the chemical experiments that were necessary to perform in order to get the information for a real homogeneous reactor. So design began on a 10,000 kilowatt heavy water moderator, light water cooled reactor using enriched uranium. Wigner came down as research director about that time and he pointed out that you have enough water in the coolant to moderate the neutrons, you really didn’t need the heavy water, so why don’t you just push the heavy water out and push the fuel elements together. In which case you would have the advantage not only of a very high slow neutron flux, but a very fast flux also, so that’s how the MTR was conceived, the cold heavy water reactor with the heavy water pushed out and the fuel elements pushed together.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. You had at that time enough enriched uranium to be able to do…
DR. WEINBERG: We did have enough enriched uranium to do it. Well the development of the MTR occurred simultaneously with Rickover’s coming to Oak Ridge. I became really quite friendly with Rickover. He spent better than a year and that’s where he learned about nuclear power.
MR. LARSON: Was that about 1947?
DR. WEINBERG: It was 1947, yes. And it was I who urged John Rickover that the way to make a nuclear powered submarine was with a high pressure water reactor because the year earlier, well I had been thinking about this for several years by this time. In 1946, one of my colleagues, a mathematician, Forrest Murray, and I had written a paper called, or a memorandum called, Pressurized Water as a Coolant and Moderator. We gave the possibilities for what later became the pressurized water reactor, just a short memorandum, about three or four pages long and I had made some calculations of what the thermo hydraulics would be and it looked like it would be a feasible thing to do. So, when Rickover came on the scene, we told him that was the way to make his submarine. First he was very reluctant to believe in it, but then one of his young lieutenants, very bright lieutenants, Naval lieutenants, looked at the matter, and sure enough there was Eli Roth and Lou Rhodes who later became very well known…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: And they decided there was something to it and so gradually Rickover got the message. Now president at the laboratory at the time was Harold Etherington, who had come down to head what was called the Daniels Pile, it was a gas cooled reactor and Harold Etherington saw the point. Sam Untermeyer was there and this was a time when zirconium was shown to be corrosion resistant by Sam Untermeyer and also that the [inaudible] was the reason zirconium caused the neutrons to be absorbed in the zirconium. People figured out how to get [inaudible] out. So this was indeed the way to make a submarine reactor and that really is how the submarine reactor got started. I’ve always been unhappy that one of the key actors in this whole pressurized water reactor for submarines has never really been given adequate credit and that was Harold Etherington.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I don’t know if you have ever met him.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. I distinctly remember meeting him.
DR. WEINBERG: He had [inaudible]. He came down along with many of the other people to this Oak Ridge [inaudible] technology.
MR. LARSON: As I remember he was such a competent engineer.
DR. WEINBERG: Oh tremendous.
MR. LARSON: He had a grasp of all of the facets of the whole thing.
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, extremely able. He was the one who made the original decisions on how the things should be laid out. The idea of having the pressurized, the canned router pump was actually invented by Sam Untermeyer.
MR. LARSON: Oh is that right? I didn’t know that.
DR. WEINBERG: Yeah, and Sam, at the time, was Eugene Wigner’s assistant for engineering at the Laboratory. So the MTR was done about the same time as the submarine reactor. The MTR was originally an Oak Ridge project, but in 1948, word came from on high that Oak Ridge was going to be out of the reactor business. So there was a big fuss that went on for a long time there. Although that was the decision on high, it was obviously not a very consistent decision because they had GE in the reactor business and Argonne was in the reactor business and so it never was quite implemented that way.
MR. LARSON: Fortunately.
DR. WEINBERG: Well I don’t know, Clarence. I look back on it and I suppose if I had to do my life all over again Clarence, I would have spent far more of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s resources really solving the waste disposal problem because we look at where we are now and we ask what is the big problem? One of them is reactor safety and the other is waste disposal problem and you know as well as I do we could have stashed those nuclear wastes permanently 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
MR. LARSON: And in retrospect, if it had been done early and it been implemented early…
DR. WEINBERG: It’s insoluble. People would say look at all the waste that we are producing in our society, the one that we really are doing right is nuclear waste.
MR. LARSON: And if it had been implemented 10 years earlier would have been a full [inaudible].
DR. WEINBERG: And if I had any regrets it would be that. Well, so, about that time, Monsanto left and the University of Chicago was suppose to come back in, but they had trouble finding a director. I think they went through 15 or so names and nobody wanted to be the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was the most curious thing. Then Union Carbide came in, still nobody wanted to be the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Finally, one day Clark Center came to me, well actually to Nelson Rutger.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: Nelson Rutger when Carbide finally came in he was designated as the director and they said we’ll give you three choices, you can be the associate director, research director, or [inaudible] director, which do you want? I said, I’ll be the associate director. So there was Nelson Rutger as the director and I became the associate director of the laboratory. So that lasted for a while and then if we go off the record for a minute…
[Break in video]
DR. WEINBERG: You remember that?
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I don’t know if you knew that I said that to Clark.
MR. LARSON: Well essentially I gathered it.
DR. WEINBERG: So, well so, we then had us a major effort of the Laboratory to attempt to develop a breeder reactor, although the MTR was done as a joint project with Argonne and ORNL, but ORNL had the guts of it, the nuclear part, nuclear island I guess you call it now, and Argonne had all the rest. I guess the MTR must be regarded as having a tremendous influence on the whole of reactor design. Well much of, the general design that you lift the stuff up from the top, which seems like an obvious thing now, but that was shown to work on the MTR and the MTR was the first really high powered enriched uranium reactor.
MR. LARSON: So it really was the prototype for the submarine reactor and then later of course, our whole pressurized water industry.
DR. WEINBERG: Well, in a way although there the connection was a little more tenuous because the pressurized water reactors use low enrichment uranium. Of course, Karl Cohen was the one who really pushed that although all of us realize that you can do it that way with low enrichment. Then of course there was that period in which the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was heavily back in the reactor business trying to make homogeneous reactors work and then we were told by Larry Halsted who was the head of reactor development that well, you can if you want to work on homogeneous reactors, you also have to work on the aircraft reactor. Most of us did not really think that the aircraft reactor really could work, but we did feel that there was some interesting technology there that someday could be applied to other aspects of reactor development, and power development. I guess we were very fortunate to have gotten R.C. Bryant, Rave Bryant, a very brilliant chemical engineer to take over the aircraft project and we pursued this possibility of making the aircraft reactors with molten salts. Interesting, the molten salts some thought were an invention that came after the war. Actually Eugene Wigner had thought of using molten salts during the war.
MR. LARSON: Oh, actually that early?
DR. WEINBERG: Yes, but not seriously. He thought of almost every combination that I’ve talked about. Well, the Laboratory did operate two high temperature molten salt reactors, these reactors, I suppose you would have to say it was a miracle that they could operate at all, rather than they operated well. The second reactor operated very well, that was the molten salt reactor experiment, which was a 70 megawatt reactor. Well, let me go back… We did operate two homogeneous reactors, but as it turned out the chemical stability of the system was not really sufficient. It was really chemically unstable. So we finally gave up on the homogeneous reactor but every now and then people keep coming back to the idea because it’s such an attractive idea in principle, but in practice, it turned out to be really quite difficult. Although the chemical engineers at the time, at some time God smiles on chemical engineers when doing things that later would be regarded as crazy, but they get away with it. Of course when you think of the containment of the first homogeneous reactor it makes your hair stand on end. It didn’t have any real containment like [inaudible] pressure and we have many millions of impurities and a thousand pounds per square inch.
MR. LARSON: That was one of the problems and why you needed the high pressure.
DR. WEINBERG: Yeah the high pressure, and I suppose, what would you say, the high temperature is probably easier than the high pressure. Neither is simple. Well so then, as an outgrowth of the nuclear airplane, Rave Bryant always conceived a nuclear airplane which he always thought it would be a dodo, it wouldn’t fly. There would be a spin off which would be a molten salt based thermal breeder. H.G. MacPherson, who had been the director of research I guess, at Carbide at the time, was leaving Carbide and he decided to come to Oak Ridge. He hadn’t been there in 1948, and when he came to my office to talk about things I said, look there is this hot idea about using molten salts or thermal breeders, don’t you think you would be just the person to do it? Which he was because graphite became so essential, he became very excited about it. That was one of the best decisions I made I think, despite the fact that the project was eventually terminated. I still think that well eventually people will come back to this way of trying reactors.
MR. LARSON: Of course, it had great advantage in that it was lower pressure…
DR. WEINBERG: Lower pressure, but high temperature.
MR. LARSON: And by dropping the temperature from the aircraft requirements, you alleviated some of the materials.
DR. WEINBERG: Right. Well, so where did we stand then? By this time it was the mid-1960’s. The pressurized water reactor had gone to be sort of a commercial device. The Laboratory became a large powerful scientific institution, which was involved in all sorts of things. The most prestigious Biology Division under the leadership of Alexander Hollaender, had a very powerful chemical technology group under Floyd Cullers direction, perhaps one of the most important contributions from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was for many years a source of isotopes, radio isotopes for scientific production. I didn’t really have very much to do with the isotope production; I suppose I have to say I didn’t have that much to do with the work in chemical technology or in biology. I took sort of interest in all these things and we’d have these information meetings each year and I would attend these and try to act fairly intelligent and try to make sure that management was interested in what they were doing, because I often felt in a big research organization one of the problems that people might have is a feeling of anonymity, that nobody really much cares whether they are there or not there. So I tried hard to maintain that and I’m pleased that my successors at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have seen fit to continue these information meetings at the laboratory.
MR. LARSON: I think those information meetings have been probably also a source of dissemination throughout the country and the world.
DR. WEINBERG: Right.
MR. LARSON: And certainly had enhanced their reputation as an institution.
DR. WEINBERG: Well, I guess I have to say that as I look at the major successes at the Laboratory, it’s difficult for me to say what the most important success was. Perhaps the two most important successes were production of radio isotopes and I suppose the other important success was that the Laboratory really set the, well established the standard designs for most of the research reactors throughout the world.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: If you look at all the research reactors in the world 90 percent of them are really copies of what we first did at Oak Ridge. Well that seems like a small thing nowadays, but at that time, the very first time it was done, it wasn’t a small thing really, but a big thing. Many of us suffered plenty that first time that the MTR started and then it stopped earlier than we thought and then we had to figure out why it was stopping and so on. All these things that look easy are really quite hard at first, but then of course we had many, many spin offs. The Biology Division has been a marvelous spin off. The materials developments, for example, the spin offs from the nuclear aircraft were these alloys which have been the basis for a huge industry now. The Cabbot Company has become very rich as a result of the commercializing of an alloy that was developed during the AFP program.
MR. LARSON: Yes, the so called NR-8, I think.
DR. WEINBERG: Which I think is alcohol [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: But yes, and then also I believe that the chemical reprocessing methods which are still used today…
DR. WEINBERG: The standard chemical [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: …all developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
DR. WEINBERG: Most of the progress of today, waste disposal came from the Laboratory. I have to say that I am disappointed that we did not succeed in really convincing the public that waste disposal was a fully practical thing. The research reactor, the High Flux Isotope Reactor is still the most powerful research reactor in the world in many respects was built at Oak Ridge. Then the many accelerators, well Oak Ridge was where heavy ion physics got started by Alexander Zucker and you can point to many things like that. Though one would have to say that the Laboratory partly because its mandate wasn’t specifically power reactors was always a bit peripheral I guess to the mainstream of reactor development which was quickly taken over by industry. The Laboratory was very much involved of course with the safety reactor.
MR. LARSON: Well, it would be a continuation of hundreds of different problems at the Laboratory and was valued to establishing the technology of the power reactor.
DR. WEINBERG: Right, so that pretty much summarizes my career as the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I guess I should say that at the same time I had this position at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory I sort of had other careers going on the side, because I was asked to serve on the President’s Science Advisory Committee for three years, from 1959 to 1962. I guess during that one summer that I was working on this report of information I got to know your father pretty well, Jane, because he was working on information also in a different respect at the other end of the hall. Every now and then we’d get together and chat. He was rather enthusiastic about his scheme. The way I get, I didn’t take it quite as seriously as he did, I don’t know how you felt about it at the time.
MRS. LARSON: Which scheme was this?
MR. LARSON: Information, dear.
DR. WEINBERG: Remember he did that scheme for the…
MRS. LARSON: Oh for the library, the Library of Medicine. Yes.
DR. WEINBERG: Well…
MRS. LARSON: I think he was stepping into a very difficult area.
DR. WEINBERG: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Into an area that still has not been solved.
DR. WEINBERG: Right, right. So as part of that career, I got interested in this whole question of science policy and how do you establish priorities in science. I wrote a number of papers which appeared in this little journal called Criteria for Scientific Choice, and that started sort of a growth industry in the science policy. I don’t know if I ask myself, well what really did you contribute in much of that stuff? Mostly I contributed as much as anything, the language which is not unimportant.
MR. LARSON: No, that‘s very important.
DR. WEINBERG: The word technological fix for example…
MR. LARSON: Yes, that’s right.
DR. WEINBERG: Or the word big science, that was something I cooked up. I would cook up these words and then they would sort of fit and people would use them. I would start people on writing learned papers on what was meant by these things. I’m amused here 20 years later that I’ve come back to that sort of philosophic discussion. The other career that I got launched on was in scientific information and I was chairman of this committee that wrote this paper on scientific information. It was called “Science Government and Information”. It’s still a rather standard work in information. Well, then I spent after I left the Laboratory, and if I look back on it I left at really just the right time. I don’t think I could have quite tolerated the present way in which the Laboratory’s relation to the Department of Energy has worked out. As I look back on it, well, I had a certain amount of freedom, not as much as perhaps I would like, but generally I think the Atomic Energy Commission was very supportive of the Laboratory. For a while I don’t think the Department of Energy has been quite that supportive, but I don’t really know that. So I spent a year in the Office of Energy Research and Development which was in the White House and then became a part of the Federal Energy Administration and we were thinking deep thoughts about energy at that time. We thought about such things as what do you do when nuclear energy falters now. We helped set up the Solar Energy Research Institute. That was an idea that came out of that office. I suppose the most important thing we did was we engineered, or helped engineer the transition from the Atomic Energy Commission to the…
MR. LARSON: ERDA, Energy Research and Development Administration.
DR. WEINBERG: Right and then at that time, I established the Institute for Energy Analysis which was suggested to me really by Phil Baker, former chairman of the Board of Bell Labs. He was very enthusiastic about it, so we got it going and it has been going for ten years now and we have done, well, had a number of fairly good ideas about what to do about the energy problem fundamentally and broadly. I guess there were two main thrusts to describe our position at the Institute for Energy Analysis as being somewhat right of center as compared to the position of most of the energy think tanks, which I regard as left of center. Now the right-left axis isn’t the usual communist-capitalist. It’s rather centralized versus decentralized, nuclear versus non-nuclear, electrical versus non-electrical, and the left thinks that the energy should be non-electrical, non-nuclear and non-central. The Right thinks it should be electrical, centralized and nuclear.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. WEINBERG: I think that though nuclear energy is in a bad state now then the market is showing us a different answer. We are continuing to move into electricity, we are continuing to find virtues in centralized electricity and I think that despite the [inaudible] experience, nuclear has got to get out of this.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it’s a matter of time and overcoming public perceptions and a lot of complicated economic factors that involve… which incidentally there are solutions for these things. It’s agonizing.
DR. WEINBERG: We don’t know everything. One of the points now is that these nuclear plants can last 100 years rather than 40. We build these big concrete devices and they can well last for 100 years. If it lasts for 100 years then we have already paid for it. Operating costs are very low and it produces that cheap electricity that you have now. So when electricity goes through a high, it eventually goes through a low again and that has to be factored into all of this.
MR. LARSON: Yes. As soon as 20 years are up the capital costs go down drastically.
DR. WEINBERG: Like Norris Dam, we paid for it, so we get the electricity for five mil per kilowatt hour at Norris Dam.
MR. LARSON: So, things you can see can change around and that’s what I was going to lead into. I remember you always use to make a lot of predictions, scientific and reactors and a lot of other things. In fact, you were very bold in making several $1 bets, or $5 bets as to what would take place one year, three years, or five years, and so I was wondering if you could dip into your crystal ball and what are some of the directions you feel…
DR. WEINBERG: Well, let me say…
MR. LARSON: …that things will take place.
DR. WEINBERG: …generally, I tended to bet optimistically on the state of the world and pessimistically on the achievements of technology because I think the achievement of nuclear power and then the space achievements have spoiled people into believing that everything is simple. In particular, my view is pessimistic on fusion. Now I may be shown to be totally wrong on this, but it just seems to me a very difficult technology, far more difficult than reactors really and probably far more expensive. I guess I continue therefore to be pessimistic about solar energy. Not that I don’t think we should be working on it, we should be working on it. I don’t really see a clear resolution on the storage problem. So, [inaudible] maybe it will turn out to be.
MR. LARSON: And the sheer problem with space required.
DR. WEINBERG: And the problem with space, then of course some of the ideas are crazy, I mean the solar satellite is really quite stupid because all you’re solving there is a storage problem because the sun is always shinning up there and there are a half dozen ways of solving the storage problem on earth that are cheaper than that and are still expensive to compete with nuclear power. Now the problems that we are having with nuclear power now are very real but I cannot believe that they are anything but transitory because you look at other countries and they don’t have these same problems. France doesn’t have these same problems. Are we more stupid than France? Russians don’t have these problems. The Swiss don’t have these same problems.
MR. LARSON: So, you would be optimistic, well due to the fact that we apparently can solve as far as technological fixes to the problem. It looks like it’s very possible. In fact, these other countries have demonstrated…
DR. WEINBERG: Right.
MR. LARSON: So what remains to be is public perception which will pass of course.
DR. WEINBERG: Right. So I see as far as the energy future is concerned, Clarence, in the future, is going to be a very heavily electrical energy future. And on this I disagree in the deepest way with energy revolutionaries like Barry Commoner and Emory Lovins with whom I often argue. I think they are just wrong as the day is long. They mistake decentralization of the energy production with decentralization in reduced electricity is exquisitely capable of decentralizing end use.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. WEINBERG: And that is more important than decentralizing the mode of production which is awkward, expensive, time consuming. No way.
MR. LARSON: And the economics just can’t possibly…
DR. WEINBERG: I don’t see how it can work. I don’t see how it can. Well, we’ve gone I don’t know, a long time, I don’t know if this is all what you wanted.
MR. LARSON: If you have I think there is…
DR. WEINBERG: Are there other things you want me to talk about?
MR. LARSON: Well, there is only one thing you’ve done, of course a tremendous amount of thinking with regard to the directions the world should take so far as coming to grips with the nuclear threats to the world...
DR. WEINBERG: Well…
MR. LARSON: …including proliferation.
DR. WEINBERG: …if you would like I can talk a few minutes about…
MR. LARSON: If you could talk on that…
DR. WEINBERG: Let me just say two things. One, I think that the connection between nuclear power and proliferation is very much exaggerated. And I think that there are additional things that can be done. For example, I think that a take back scheme ought to be instituted, where you take the spent fuel back and this is not much of a hardship because it’s turned out that because the price of the breeder has gone up and the price of uranium has gone up also, the time when we would need the breeder has been pushed into the future and therefore the incentive for doing reprocessing isn’t as great as if we used these things. So I don’t know, we have 20, 30 years to do other things and I think the most sensible thing to do is have the United States say either take title to all its fuel and simply lease it so it comes back or require that all the spent fuel come back to the United States. Use essentially the same scheme that the Soviet Union is using, where they insist on taking all the fuel back.
MR. LARSON: And that seems to be 100 percent successful…
DR. WEINBERG: Yes. One hundred percent successful and it solves for these other countries the problem of waste disposal.
MR. LARSON: Which is one of the things that is mutually satisfactory to both countries.
DR. WEINBERG: And then with respect to the proliferation of nuclear weapons which is by far the most important problem that the world is facing. I should go back a moment and say that Eugene Wigner came back to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; I guess it was the early ‘60’s to institute a program on civil defense. I became very influenced by his thinking and have been racking my brain for 20 years or more for how do you deal with the arms race, the arms confrontation and is there some configuration other than mutually insured destruction. About 18 years ago I gave a speech called “Let Us Prepare for Peace”, which I said true disarmament, total disarmament, does not come from a posture of strong defense because you wouldn’t trust them if you knew they had a weapon. But people were not ready to listen then, but here it is in 1984, President Reagan has made his famous Star Wars speech on March 23, 1983, I think the whole issue is being reopened and I think there are some possibilities now that are getting very serious attention. The one that, a young colleague of mine, Jack Parsons is proposing that we are very enthusiastic about we are hoping will be taken serious is this thing called the Defense Protective Build Down. This is an idea where by you deploy defensive weapons initially within the ABM treaty. The United States deploys defensive weapons which protect its first strike weapons, the MXs, but because they are now protected, they are less vulnerable to a strike from the Soviets, and therefore you don’t need as many of them to have the same second strike capability and therefore at the same time you deploy your defense you can without reducing your second strike capability reduce the number of offensive weapons. That is you compensate, you reduce your offensive first strike weapons by an amount that compensates for the amount of defense that you put up which can prevent the first strike from the other guy from wiping you out.
MR. LARSON: Well, that’s a practical step by step…
DR. WEINBERG: Right. I have been trying to promote this in articles recently published for foreign policy along these lines, creating a fair amount of discussion. At least it’s a new idea and this remarkable book called Weapons and Hope suggests that weapons and ideas of this genre are right for serious consideration. So some of us are seriously considering devoting a good deal of our time and attention to exactly this question.
MR. LARSON: It really is not totally inconsistent with the so called Star Wars…
DR. WEINBERG: No, it’s very much in that line. I think that Defense Secretary Weinberger I don’t think was justified in promising total defense with any degree to Star Wars. I don’t think [inaudible]
MR. LARSON: Of course it is, there is a little bit of an analogy there, but the bullet proof vests for police men are not 100 percent but they certainly, they help save a large number of lives.
DR. WEINBERG: So I don’t know, maybe that will change the terms of the discussion. I look forward to it being pretty exciting and you know I’m only going on 70 years old, Clarence, so I’m just ready to get going on this. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. This is wonderful. I’m sure there will be a lot of discussion on this in the future.
DR. WEINBERG: Let’s hear a little bit of the sound…
MR. LARSON: This has been marvelous and I think that this concludes…
[End of Interview]